than the intrusion, as though by direct intervention of Providence, of
this Assyrian spirit into the vapidly polite circles of
eighteenth-century London. The fact that, as far as the middle classes
of England were concerned, Puritanism had for a century and a half
blocked every inlet and outlet of poetical feeling and imaginative
conviction save one, may give us a clue to the causes of such a
phenomenon. It was the devotion of Puritan England to the Bible, to the
Old Testament especially, that fed such a spirit as Blake’s directly
from the sources of the most primeval, the vastest and most abstract
imagery which we possess. Brooding on the vague and tremendous images of
Hebrew and Chaldæan poetry, he arrived at such indifference to the
actual material world, at such an intimate perception of the elemental
forces which sway the spirit with immortal hopes and infinite terrors
when it is most withdrawn from its bodily conditions, that what was
given to his internal vision became incomparably more definite, more
precisely and more clearly articulated, than anything presented to his
senses. His forms are the visible counterparts to those words, like _the
deep, many waters_, _firmament_, _the foundations of the earth_, _pit_
and _host_, whose resonant overtones blur and enrich the sense of the
Old Testament. Blake’s art moves us, if at all, by a similar evocation
of vast elemental forces. He deals directly with these spiritual
sensations, bringing in from external nature the least possible content
which will enable him to create visible forms at all. But though he
pushed them to their furthest limits, even he could not transcend the
bounds which beset pictorial language; even he was forced to take
something of external nature with him into his visionary world, and his
wildest inventions are but recombinations and distorted memories of the
actual objects of sense.
By the strangest irony, too, the forms which came to his hand as the
readiest means of expressing his stupendous conceptions were in
themselves the least expressive, the least grandiose, that ever art has
dealt with. It was with the worn-out rags of an effete classical
tradition long ago emptied of all meaning, and given over to turgid
rhetorical display, that Blake had to piece together the visible
garments of his majestic and profound ideas. The complete obsession of
his nature by these ideas in itself compelled him to this: he was
entirely without curiosity about such trivial and ephemeral things as
the earth contained. His was the most anti-Hellenic temperament; he had
no concern, either gay or serious, with phenomena; they were too
transparent to arrest his eye, and that patient and scientific quarrying
from the infinite possibilities of nature of just the appropriate forms
to convey his ideas was beyond the powers with which nature and the poor
traditions of his day supplied him. Tintoretto, who had in some respects
a similar temperament, who felt a similar need of conveying directly the
revelations of his internal vision, was more happily situated. He was,
by comparison, a trivial and vulgar seer, but the richness and
expressive power of the forms which lay to his hand in Titian’s and
Michelangelo’s art enabled him to attain a more unquestionable
achievement.
But, allowing for circumstances, what Blake did was surely more
considerable and implied a greater sheer lift of imaginative effort.
That it was an attempt which remained almost without consequences,
isolated and incomplete--marred, too, by a certain incoherence and want
of reasonable co-ordination--must be allowed, and may perhaps explain
why Blake is not universally admitted among our greatest.
The Byzantine style, he declares, was directly and divinely revealed to
him; and whether this were so, or whether he obtained it by the dim
indications of Ottley’s prints, or through illuminated manuscripts, the
marvellous fact remains that he did succeed in recovering for a moment
that pristine directness and grandeur of expression which puts him
beside the great Byzantine designers as the only fit interpreter of
Hebrew mythology. His “Flight into Egypt”[43] will at once recall
Giotto’s treatment of the subject in the Arena chapel at Padua; but the
likeness is, in a sense, deceptive, for Giotto was working away from
Byzantinism as fast as Blake was working towards it, and the two pass
one another on the road. For there is here but little of Giotto’s tender
human feeling, less still of his robust rationalism; what they have in
common, what Blake rediscovered and Giotto inherited, is the sentiment
of supernatural dignity, the hieratic solemnity and superhuman
purposefulness of the gestures. Even more than in Giotto’s version, the
Virgin here sits on the ass as though enthroned in monumental state, her
limbs fixed in the rigid symmetry which oriental art has used to express
complete withdrawal from the world of sense. No less perfect in its
expressiveness of the strange and exalted mood is the movement, repeated
with such impressive monotony, in the figures of Joseph and the
archangel. It is absurd, we think, to deny to the man who discovered the
lines of these figures the power of draughtsmanship. Since Giotto’s day
scarcely any one has drawn thus--simplification has been possible only
as the last effort of consummate science refining away the superfluous;
but here the simplification of the forms is the result of an instinctive
passionate reaching out for the direct symbol of the idea.
Blake’s art indeed is a test case for our theories of æsthetics. It
boldly makes the plea for art that it is a language for conveying
impassioned thought and feeling, which takes up the objects of sense
[Illustration:
Blake. Bathsheba Tate Gallery
Plate XIV.]
as a means to this end, owing them no allegiance and accepting from them
only the service that they can render for this purpose. “Poetry,” says
Blake, “consists in bold, daring, and masterly conceptions; and shall
painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations
of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and
music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and
visionary conception?” The theory that art appeals solely by the
associated ideas of the natural objects it imitates is easily refuted
when we consider music and architecture; in those at least the appeal to
the spirit is made directly in a language which has no other use than
that of conveying its own proper ideas and feelings. But in pictorial
art the fallacy that nature is the mistress instead of the servant seems
almost ineradicable, and it is difficult to convince people that
increased scientific investigation of phenomena, increased knowledge of
how things present themselves to our sight, changes the mode, but does
not necessarily increase the power, of pictorial expression. The
Byzantine artists, with a knowledge of appearances infinitely less than
that of the average art student of to-day, could compass the expression
of imaginative truths which our most accomplished realists dare not
attempt. The essential power of pictorial as of all other arts lies in
its use of a fundamental and universal symbolism, and whoever has the
instinct for this can convey his ideas, though possessed of only the
most rudimentary knowledge of the actual forms of nature; while he who
has it not can by no accumulation of observed facts add anything to the
spiritual treasure of mankind. Of this language of symbolic form in
which the spirit communicates its most secret and indefinable impulses
Blake was an eloquent and persuasive master. He could use it, too, to
the most diverse ends; and though the sublimity which is based upon
dread came most readily to his mind, he could express, as we have seen
in the “Flight into Egypt,” the sublimity of divine introspection. In
the “David and Bathsheba” (see Plate) he touches a different note, and
he shows his true power of symbolic expression in this, that it is not
by the treatment of the figure itself, not by any ordinary sensual
enticements, that he gives the atmosphere of voluptuous abandonment. It
is rather in the extravagant tropical flowers, in the architecture which
itself blossoms with oriental exuberance, in the fiery orange of the
clouds seen behind trees preternaturally virid, that the spirit is
bewildered with anticipations of extravagant bliss. The picture might be
described in Blake’s own terminology as the mental abstract of
voluptuousness.
All art gives us an experience freed from the disturbing conditions of
actual life. Blake’s art, more concentrated than most, gives us an
experience which is removed more entirely from bodily and physiological
accompaniments, and our experience has the purity, the intensity, and
the abstraction of a dream.
CLAUDE[44]
In spite of all the attacks of critics, in spite of the development of
emphasis and high flavour in modern romantic landscape, which might well
have spoilt us for his cool simplicity, Claude still lives, not, indeed,
as one of the gods of the sale-room, but in the hearts of contemplative
and undemonstrative people. This is surely an interesting and
encouraging fact. It means that a very purely artistic and poetical
appeal still finds its response in the absence of all subsidiary
interests and attractions. The appeal is, indeed, a very limited one,
touching only certain highly self-conscious and sophisticated moods, but
it is, within its limits, so sincere and so poignant that Claude’s very
failings become, as it were, an essential part of its expression. These
failings are, indeed, so many and so obvious that it is not to be
wondered at if, now and again, they blind even a sensitive nature like
Ruskin’s to the fundamental beauty and grandeur of Claude’s revelation.
But we must be careful not to count as failings qualities which are
essential to the particular kind of beauty that Claude envisages,
though, to be quite frank, it is sometimes hard to make up one’s mind
whether a particular characteristic is a lucky defect or a calculated
negation. Take, for instance, the peculiar _gaucherie_ of his
articulations. Claude knows less, perhaps, than any considerable
landscape painter--less than the most mediocre of modern
landscapists--how to lead from one object to another. His foregrounds
are covered with clumsily arranged leaves which have no organic growth,
and which, as often as not, lie on the ground instead of springing from
it. His trees frequently isolate themselves helplessly from their parent
soil. In particular, when he wants a _repoussoir_ in the foreground at
either end of his composition he has recourse to a clumsily constructed
old bare trunk, which has little more meaning than a stage property.
Even in his composition there are _naïvetés_ which may or may not be
intentional: sometimes they have the happiest effect, at others they
seem not childlike but childish. Such, for instance, is his frequent
habit of dividing spaces equally, both vertically and horizontally,
either placing his horizontal line half-way up the picture, or a
principal building on the central vertical line. At times this seems the
last word of a highly subtilised simplicity, of an artifice which
conceals itself; at others one cannot be sure that it is not due to
incapacity. There is, in fact, a real excuse for Ruskin’s exaggerated
paradox that Claude’s drawings look like the work of a child of ten.
There is a whole world of beauty which one must not look for at all in
Claude. All that beauty of the sudden and unexpected revelation of an
unsuspected truth which the Gothic and Early Renaissance art provides is
absent from Claude. As the eye follows his line it is nowhere arrested
by a sense of surprise at its representative power, nor by that peculiar
thrill which comes from the communication of some vital creative force
in the artist. Compare, for instance, Claude’s drawing of mountains,
which he knew and studied constantly, with Rembrandt’s. Rembrandt had
probably never seen mountains, but he obtained a more intimate
understanding by the light of his inner vision than Claude could ever
attain to by familiarity and study. We need not go to Claude’s figures,
where he is notoriously feeble and superficially Raphaelesque, in order
to find how weak was his hold upon character, whatever the object he set
himself to interpret. In the British Museum there is a most careful and
elaborate study of the rocky shores of a stream. Claude has even
attempted here to render the contorted stratification of the river-bed,
but without any of that intimate imaginative grasp of the tension and
stress which underlie the appearance which Turner could give in a few
hurried scratches. No one, we may surmise, ever loved trees more deeply
than Claude, and we know that he prided himself on his careful
observation of the difference of their specific characters; and yet he
will articulate their branches in the most haphazard, perfunctory
manner. There is nothing in all Claude’s innumerable drawings which
reveals the inner life of the tree itself, its aspirations towards air
and light, its struggle with gravitation and wind, as one little drawing
by Leonardo da Vinci does.
All these defects might pass more easily in a turbulent romanticist,
hurrying pell mell to get expressed some moving and dramatic scene,
careless of details so long as the main movement were ascertained, but
there is none of this fire in Claude. It is with slow ponderation and
deliberate care that he places before us his perfunctory and generalised
statements, finishing and polishing them with relentless assiduity, and
not infrequently giving us details that we do not desire and which add
nothing but platitude to the too prolix statement.
All this and much more the admirer of Claude will be wise to concede to
the adversary, and if the latter ask wherein the beauty of a Claude lies
he may with more justice than in any other case fall back on the reply
of one of Du Maurier’s æsthetes, “in the picture.” For there is
assuredly a kind of beauty which is not only compatible with these
defects but perhaps in some degree depends on them. We know and
recognise it well enough in literature. To take a random instance.
Racine makes Titus say in “Bérénice”: “De mon aimable erreur je suis
désabusé.” This may be a dull, weak, and colourless mode of expression,
but if he had said with Shakespeare, “Now old desire doth in his
death-bed lie, and young affection gapes to be his heir,” we should feel
that it would destroy the particular kind of even and unaccented harmony
at which Racine aimed. Robert Bridges, in his essay on Keats, very aptly
describes for literature the kind of beauty which we find in
Shakespeare: “the power of concentrating all the far-reaching resources
of language on one point, so that a single and apparently effortless
expression rejoices the æsthetic imagination at the moment when it is
most expectant and exacting.” That, _ceteris paribus_, applies admirably
to certain kinds of design. It corresponds to the nervous touch of a
Pollajuolo or a Rembrandt. But Claude’s line is almost nerveless and
dull. Even when it is most rapid and free it never surprises us by any
intimate revelation of character, any summary indications of the central
truth. But it has a certain inexpressive beauty of its own. It is never
elegant, never florid, and, above all, never has any ostentation of
cleverness. The beauty of Claude’s work is not to be sought primarily in
his drawing: it is not a beauty of expressive parts but the beauty of a
whole. It corresponds in fact to the poetry of his century--to Milton or
Racine. It is in the cumulative effect of the perfect co-ordination of
parts none of which is by itself capable of absorbing our attention or
fascinating our imagination that the power of a picture by Claude lies.
It is the unity and not the content that affects us. There is, of
course, content, but the content is only adequate to its purpose and
never claims our attention on its own account. The objects he presents
to us have no claim on him but as parts of a scheme. They have no life
and purpose of their own, and for that very reason it is right that they
should be stated in vague and general terms. He wishes a tree to convey
to the eye only what the word “tree” might suggest at once to the inner
vision. We think first of the mass of waving shade held up against the
brilliance of the sky, and this, even with all his detailed elaboration,
is about where Claude, whether by good fortune or design, leaves us. It
is the same with his rocks, his water, his animals. They are all made
for the mental imagery of the contemplative wanderer, not of the acute
and ardent observer. But where Claude is supreme is in the marvellous
invention with which he combines and recombines these abstract symbols
so as to arouse in us more purely than nature herself can the mood of
pastoral delight. That Claude was deeply influenced by Virgil one would
naturally suppose from his antiquarian classicism, and a drawing in the
British Museum shows that he had the idea of illustrating the Æneid. In
any case his pictures translate into the language of painting much of
the sentiment of Virgil’s Eclogues, and that with a purity and grace
that rival his original. In his landscapes Melibœus always leaves his
goats to repose with Daphnis under the murmuring shade, waiting till his
herds come of themselves to drink at the ford, or in sadder moods of
passionless regret one hears the last murmurs of the lament for Gallus
as the well-pastured goats turn homewards beneath the evening star.
Claude is the most ardent worshipper that ever was of the _genius loci_.
Of his landscapes one always feels that “some god is in this place.”
Never, it is true, one of the greater gods: no mysterious and fearful
Pan, no soul-stirring Bacchus or all-embracing Demeter; scarcely, though
he tried more than once deliberately to invoke them, Apollo and the
Muses, but some mild local deity, the inhabitant of a rustic shrine
whose presence only heightens the glamour of the scene.
[Illustration:
Claude. Landscape Prado, Madrid
Plate XV.]
It is the sincerity of this worship, and the purity and directness of
its expression, which makes the lover of landscape turn with such
constant affection to Claude, and the chief means by which he
communicates it is the unity and perfection of his general design; it is
not by form considered in itself, but by the planning of his tone
divisions, that he appeals, and here, at least, he is a past master.
This splendid architecture of the tone masses is, indeed, the really
great quality in his pictures; its perfection and solidity are what
enables them to bear the weight of so meticulous and, to our minds,
tiresome an elaboration of detail without loss of unity, and enables us
even to accept the enamelled hardness and tightness of his surface. But
many people of to-day, accustomed to our more elliptical and
quick-witted modes of expression, are so impatient of these qualities
that they can only appreciate Claude’s greatness through the medium of
his drawings, where the general skeleton of the design is seen without
its adornments, and in a medium which he used with perfect ease and
undeniable beauty. Thus to reject the pictures is, I think, an error,
because it was only when a design had been exposed to constant
correction and purification that Claude got out of it its utmost
expressiveness, and his improvisations steadily grow under his critical
revision to their full perfection. But in the drawings, at all events,
Claude’s great powers of design are readily seen, and the study of the
drawings has this advantage also, that through them we come to know of a
Claude whose existence we could never have suspected by examining only
his finished pictures.
In speaking of the drawings it is well to recognise that they fall into
different classes with different purposes and aims. We need not, for
instance, here consider the records of finished compositions in the
“Liber Veritatis.” There remain designs for paintings in all stages of
completeness, from the first suggestive idea to the finished cartoon and
the drawings from nature. It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to remark
that it would have been quite foreign to Claude’s conception of his art
to have painted a picture from nature. He, himself, clearly
distinguished sharply between his studies and his compositions. His
studies, therefore, were not incipient pictures, but exercises done for
his own pleasure or for the fertility they gave to his subsequent
invention, and they have the unchecked spontaneity and freedom of hand
that one would expect in such unreflecting work. These studies again
fall into two groups: first, studies of detail, generally of foliage or
of tree forms, and occasionally of rocks and flowers; and secondly,
studies of general effects. Of the studies of detail I have already said
something. They have the charm of an easy and distinguished calligraphy,
and of a refined selection of the decorative possibilities of the things
seen, but without any of that penetrating investigation of their vital
nature which gives its chief beauty to the best work of this kind.
It is, indeed, in the second group of studies from nature that we come
from time to time upon motives that startle and surprise us. We find in
these a susceptibility to natural charms which, in its width of range
and freedom from the traditional limitations of the art of landscape,
is most remarkable. Here we find not only Claude the prim
seventeenth-century classic, but Claude the romanticist, anticipating
the chief ideas of Corot’s later development,[45] and Claude the
impressionist, anticipating Whistler and the discovery of Chinese
landscape, as, for instance, in the marvellous _aperçu_ of a mist
effect, in the British Museum.[46] Or, again, in a view which is quite
different from any of these, but quite as remote from the Claude of the
oil-paintings, in the great view of the Tiber, a masterpiece of hurried,
almost unconscious planning of bold contrasts of transparent gloom and
dazzling light on water and plain.
The impression one gets from looking through a collection of Claude’s
drawings like that at the British Museum is of a man without any keen
feeling for objects in themselves, but singularly open to impressions of
general effects in nature, watching always for the shifting patterns of
foliage and sky to arrange themselves in some beautifully significant
pattern and choosing it with fine and critical taste. But at the same
time he was a man with vigorous ideas of the laws of design and the
necessity of perfectly realised unity, and to this I suppose one must
ascribe the curious contrast between the narrow limits of his work in
oil as compared with the wide range, the freedom
[Illustration:
Claude. Water-colour British Museum
Plate XVI.]